No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Magic Donkey

Episode Date: April 21, 2017

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss the first ever lie detector, a robotic Cleopatra and the world's largest exporter of false teeth.

Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter-Mari, and Anna Chisinski. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones, only this time not with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, but with the best four facts sent in by you, the listener. And so, in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is you, Chisansky. Yeah, my fact was tweeted into us by someone called Owen Nelligan. So thanks for this, Owen. This fact is that the person who invented the lie detector married the first person he interrogated with it.

Did he say, will you eventually marry me? And she said no, and then it came up as a lie. Well, it's so close to that. According to a book about the history of lie detection and polygraphs, he... So this is a guy called John Augustus Larson, and he was using a lie detector to interrogate Margaret Taylor. And it was about a diamond ring that she'd had stolen. And so the result of the interrogation was that her diamond ring was found and returned to her. And she was so grateful that she volunteered her services to him to play criminal in other lie detection tests.

And then after about a year, apparently, he had her on the lie detection test. And he said, do you love me? And she said, no. And it came up as a lie. And she said it's bullshit. It sounds not true. No, no, I really don't. Oh, well, the machine's saying it.

Sorry. Well, I guess of the machine saying it, I must do. Do you take this man to be a lawfully wedded husband? No. Sorry. Because it made news the fact that they got married. It was headline news at the time. The San Francisco Examiner had it on its front page.

It said, inventor of lie detector traps bride. They had their wedding as well with all the police force there. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and they played a prank on them basically immediately after. with a ceremony. They beat them up. They handcuff them and they packed them

into a paddy wagon and just abandoned them in a countryside. Just left them. It's a classic police prank. Yeah. So I'm a bit confused about him inventing this thing.

John Augustus last, the man who married the woman he interrogated. Yes. So the invention of the line detector involves several stages, I guess. But what he did was

he integrated a test for blood pressure that had already been invented by someone called William Marston. And he integrated that with a way to measure your pulse, your respiration,

and your skin conductivity, and put that all together, and then that was what became called the polygraph. So there are lots of different people who might have invented it. Yes. If only we had a way of telling who was the real one.

And you say someone called William Marston, but William Marston is hugely famous in the world of comic books because he is the inventor of Wonder Woman. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so the inventor of the lie detector, also, well, the inventor of one of the stages of the lie detector also created Wonder Woman

and it was his wife Elizabeth who helped him sort of connect the dots about the idea of emotion and blood pressure being combined as a thing that you could tell people's emotions from I guess for truth or false. How did he trap her? With the I assume

The Lesu probably of the LaSue which she has a Wonder Woman has a lesu and anyone causing it can't lie. She has a lie detector Yeah no way. Yeah that's her weapon. That's not a lie detector though is it? If you can't lie That's not a lie detector because every single thing you say will be the truth

It's just a lie preventer Yeah, yeah, that's true Just very quickly on William Marston He had a really odd relationship Because they're not sure who Wonder Woman Was properly based on They think that it was his wife Elizabeth But also they think it was this other lady

Called Olive Turns out that they had an open relationship And they're based on both So just a little nugget there He lived with both women, didn't he? Yeah, he did, yeah Which of those two was the one who wore the weird outfit? One of them wore the outfit

But the other one had a golden lassie He wasn't a very creative man at all He was a bit of a self-promoter Wasn't he? I think that's why we associate him With the polygraph these days So there was a Gillette advert in 1938 Which he appeared on

To say that the company's razors were better Than the competition But he's using the polygraph Yeah, he sort of hooked people up to it Which race is best Is a Gilletta Wilkins and Sword And presumably if they said Wilkins and Sword They probably cut it

Because polygraphs don't actually work, do they? No, this is the thing, it's amazing these things are complete crocs. So they don't work, but they're still used or are they not used anymore? Not used. But am I right saying in court they don't necessarily take them as solid evidence? They do. They do on Jeremy Kyle, though.

Right. But they're used in lots of other processes. So there was an article this week about how Trump's having real problems with getting a border control force up. So he wanted to increase the US border control by thousands. And actually, their numbers are decreasing at the moment in the US border control. And one of the reasons for that is that two thirds of them fail the lie detector test that you have to pass to get into US border control.

I didn't know you... Do you need to pass one to become president? I do not believe so. So if you are a particularly guilty person, just in general, you might fail a lie detector test just because you think of what would happen if you had told a light or if you had committed the crime that they're asking you about.

So that will cause you a spike in blood pressure or a spike in temperature or a spike in your heart rate or whatever. And also, you can normalise the responses. So if they're asking you control questions at the beginning and you, let's say you bite your tongue or you stab the inside of your leg with a fork or whatever while that's happening, then that will cause a big spike.

And I think, well, those spikes are normal when he's answering those control questions. So later on, when we're asking him about the murder, you might have the same spike and they'll say, well, no, you didn't do it. Do you think they'll be suspicious because you bring a fork into the polygraph test? Yeah, they might.

Well, you're bleeding out of your mouth from all that gun biting. Mr. Murray, is it true that you stole all the forks from the cartoon. So on the guide that this fact is about, he sold the crime that he was put in charge of solving. So it was this mystery on the campus of the University of California over who was stealing lots of the students' possessions.

So Margaret Taylor, who he married, had a diamond ring stolen. And he figured out who it was because he did a lie detector test on all of these students. And this is how it worked. It ended up working, apparently, to prove that the lie detector test would work forever more. The way it worked was he sat someone down who was called Helen Graham and asked her if she'd taken the money. She exploded with rage, tore all of her equipment off, ran over to the recording device to tear it up

and said it was outrageous that anyone was allowed to use that. She had to be restrained and said that otherwise she would have beaten the officer in the face. So it sounds like she did it. And she did to then admit later on to doing the crime yet. So that's how they work. They just send you flying into a rage. I think that is how they work, isn't it?

Like, really, the only way that a polygraph could possibly work in a court of law is by making you admit to something, right? Because people think they work. Yeah. Yeah, so they then become truthful. So there was, this was supposedly a method they used in BC era to determine whether someone was lying or not. Supposedly, in India, this was used. What you would do is you'd get a donkey and you'd cover its tail in soot, right? And then you put the donkey in a tent, okay?

And this is a dark tent and it's at night that you do this. And then you put the suspected liar in there and you say, we've got a magic donkey. And you have to grab the tail of the donkey when you're in there. And if it braes, we'll know that you committed the crime. But actually, what it is, if they come out and they haven't got soot all over their hands, then you know that they didn't even grab the donkey's tail in the first place. So that's how they tell that you're the wronging.

There's a story that Charles Napier did that, who's one of the inventors of logarithms. he did it with a chicken. So he had a dark room, put sutt on his cock, and then asked people... Andy. I knew you were going to say it, but I'm so pleased when you did. No, he did a dark room, put sutt on his chicken, and then told people it was a magic chicken. And again, it was the people without sutted hands who he knew were guilty. Yeah, but actually, even if I was innocent, I wouldn't take the risk of the chicken actually being magic and wrong.

Because you do assume It could be a magic chicken Who's just got it in for you Yeah, exactly That chicken's always hated me Because you do assume that If you pull a donkey's tail It probably will bray

And I think even in the illogical days Of the BC era People knew that they might do that Even if they hadn't committed the crime What are we meant to say for the BC era What's the correct way of saying it? This was before the time of Christ Yeah, sure.

Before the common era, I think. Yeah. What's the E? And the BCE era. James said it a second ago. You just said it literally. Wow. But we could switch those two sentences, right?

Yes. Makes sense. Do you want to know another method of telling the truth? Yes, please. Is it from which era is it from? This is from the AD era. The Adonai era. Exactly, yeah.

What does AD stand for? So this is, in China. it's when you're being prosecuted, you have to hold a mouth full of rice, right, during the prosecutor's speech. Now, it was believed that when people are anxious, they stop salivating. Okay, so, and you know that feeling of having a dry mouth when you're nervous. So if the rice was dry by the time the prosecutor finished speaking, it was believed that you were guilty because you hadn't been salivating and the prosecutors talking about your crime. Which is unreliable because actually they could have just taken lots of ecstasy, for instance. Yeah.

That's true. Does that give you a dry mouth? Yeah, I've heard, yeah. Yeah. Do you know who invented the first way of measuring your pulse? Oh, that must be a before common era thing, isn't it? It's not. So actually, maybe it's the first way that this book I was reading claimed. So it was Galileo, apparently. But it's really clever.

So at the time, people didn't have watches where you could, you know, obviously check someone's pulse against the ticking of your watch. You'd check it by the sundial. Just stay there for hours. Full day. So he invented this thing called the pulsillogium. And what he did was he rigged up this pendulum. So he hung this pendulum up. And then he got the pendulum going.

And it was attached to a thread. So it was swinging and attached to this thread that he could pull on to make it longer or shorter. And he'd have the pendulum in one hand with his hand on that thread. And then he'd test someone's pulse with the other hand. And he'd make the string. longer or shorter until it was exactly in time with that person's pulse. And that's a really accurate way of measuring it because the length of the pendulum tells you how fast their pulse is going. And then you know if that's normal. Isn't that really clever?

That is really cool. That is. He was pretty clever, wasn't he? He was okay. Yeah. There is a method where, so this is a test they tried in the 1980s. Basically, there were loads of different light detector tests and would they hope that they're going to get a really accurate one at some point? There's a test called P300, which is basically that after you see, a very distinct image, your brain will have a little burst of activity at 300 milliseconds after you see it, right? Right.

So the idea was, if someone had committed a crime, let's say I mugged someone who was wearing an orange suit. Right. And I saw that suit again later. My brain would register that same burst of activity. But then an orange suit is quite unusual, so I think if I saw an orange suit, I would also be... This is the problem.

And you have to find things that the criminals saw and that are unique. So maybe he works in an orange suit factory And he won't register the same thing And actually criminals wear orange boiler suits, don't they? Yeah, that's true. So he might just be worried about the prospect To go into prison for a crime he didn't commit. So that did not work, basically.

So is the logic there that if you know that that test happening, if you commit a crime, you should do it in a place With no distinguishing features? Like slough. Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is Andy. My fact is that Liechtenstein has roughly two companies for every person who lives there.

So this is a fact from a guy called Richard Smith at Richard A.V. Smith. So probably we're not saying that these people all own two companies, are we? No, we're not, because a lot of the companies are from overseas, but they're registered in Liechtenstein because it's a tax haven.

And they make all their money from extremely dubious financial arrangements. They don't make all their money, or indeed any of their money from dubious arrangements, I'm sure, just in case the liars are listening. I'm sure they make a lot of their money from practices that are frowned on in the wider international community, but which happened to be legal in Liechtenstein.

But they make money on false teeth, don't they? I remember there's an old QI fact that they're the biggest exporters of false teeth in the world in Einstein. I think China might be about to overtake them. But Lichtenstein has been punching above his way for some time. They've got 35,000 people. It's amazing that they export more than China. How many of the companies are false teeth factories?

Almost all of them, actually. There's very little tax haven stuff going on. Are we talking teeth with gums, as in full sets of dentures? Individuals. So not individual teeth. Well, I guess it depends, doesn't it? I think it's dentures.

I think it's one company that makes all these dentures. I think it's in Lichtenstein. It's a funny old place, isn't it? It's an amazing little place, yeah. I mean, it's named after the guy who bought it. That's pretty amazing. And the family who still are the royalty there are the descendants of him. So it's still the Liechtenstein family.

You just never see that because they never use their surname. So weird. It's like Queen Elizabeth, you know. You rarely see Windsor. Oh, is she not called England? So it's 160 square kilometres, which is 174th the size of Yorkshire. Whoa. I mean, I don't know how big Yorkshire is, but...

It's quite big. But it's smaller than like England for instance. Yeah. Yeah. I read a really good fact in Lonely Planet about Liechtenstein, which is that their last military engagement was in 1866. It's the last time they sent soldiers out. So 80 soldiers went out and 81 returned.

They made a friend and brought one back. Well, what is a friend other than someone that you've captured? Well, you know, it's an Italian guy who's just like, I love you guys, you're really fun. I'll come back to Lichtenstein. Sounds like Stockholm syndrome to me. In 2007, 170 Swiss troops marched into Lichtenstein by accident on a training exercise, they crossed the border. So basically, it's their army going into another country, which could be kind of a bad thing, I guess. But the truth is that Lichtenstein's defense is actually looked after by Switzerland.

Lichtenstein doesn't really have an army of its own. That's such a confusing defense attack strategy that's going through your head, man. So you could march in, and then if anyone stops you. Stop hitting yourself. They've done it a few times, actually. They threw grenades into Lichtenstein, I think, in the late 60s. And another time they set a bit on fire with flamethrowers. They started a forest fire.

They did ring to apologize after the 2007 one, didn't they? I think they went in. Lichtenstein didn't know. they ran away again quickly after they realized and then they called the next day to say I'm really sorry we accidentally invaded you and the minister of the interior said it's no problem at all these things happen so that happened again in 2002 when British Marines invaded Spain by mistake thinking that they were practicing invading Gibraltar despite the fact Gibraltar has a massive rock sticking out of it that they and they said well the beach is very confusing actually so they

stormed ashore they had assault rifles there mortars they took up a defensive position just to face a couple of Spanish fishermen and a couple of local policemen who said Gibraltar's over there, look. And the MOD later on said, it was clearly an embarrassing and unfortunate incident. They made their apologies and left. But when they said Gibraltar's over there, does that mean the army asked for directions?

No, I don't think they did. I think the Spanish police must have known that they were doing a training exercise. Rather than assuming they were being invaded by Britain. Although apologising and leaving, it's a very British way to invade someone. Yeah. Sorry.

The ruler, prince of Lichtenstein, is the wealthiest monarch in Europe. Wow. He's in the billions, isn't he? He's five billion, I think. They're both of the billions. Yeah. Well, the Queen's, because the Crown wealth doesn't actually count towards the Queen's personal wealth officially.

Otherwise, obviously, she'd be well up there. Yeah. But yeah, he's loaded, but people love him. So in July 2012, Lichtenstein did a bit of a turkey, and there was a referendum on, I think we can call it that, there was a referendum on whether the prince should have all of his powers extended and whether he should have the power to veto the results of any future referendum. And 76% of the country said yes.

Yeah, we think if there are ever referenda in future, you should be allowed to overrule them immediately. So they love the guy. Wow. They do. And he's an interesting character because during that period he threatened to just leave. I think that was why they voted. He said if it goes the other way, I'm just going to leave.

I'm going to take all my money. I'm going to take the name of the country with me. You have to think of a new name. I'm taking back that Italian who came back with the army. I'm taking everything. And he, because they had another referendum where they wanted to talk about abortion and whether it should be legal, because there's illegal in Liechtenstein. And they said we want it legal.

And he just went, no, sorry, I'm overruling that. It's not happening. He once a year throws a big party for everyone in Lichtenstein. Liechtenstein to come to his, the palaces. But actually 20-odd percent of those wanted him to leave the country. Yes. The people invited to this party. We'll put them over near the toilets.

Yeah. It doesn't all grudges like that. 36,000 people invited to the same party. And it's supposed to be a garden party on his lawn. So I just wonder how big his lawn is. I guess if you own Liechtenstein, the whole thing is your garden. So it's just like, that's the party. It's wherever you are.

So just stay at home. Yeah. Well, how do you not attend the party? and you're annoyed about the referendum. That's why everyone attends the party. 30,000 isn't that many, though, is it? Like, if you think about a football game, like my United game would have, what, 70,000 or something?

I guess. It's quite a lot. I'm thinking of my flat now. So I think his garden is probably bigger than your flat. But not by much. I know what you're saying. Yeah. I've never been to your flat. No. Oh, sorry, yeah. We had a party.

I'm afraid not the whole population of the podcast was invited. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact was sent in by Luke Haynes, that was on email. In 47 BC, there was a giant robot Cleopatra walking the streets of Alexandria, squirting milk from her breasts onto the heads of onlookers. Okay. Yes. This was sent to you personally, was it done? This was sent to all of us, but I think it was edged towards me in the email. And do you stand by it? Well, I did when I read it and sent it to you and let you all research it. And now having Googled it, I can't find any evidence that it's real. It appears in a new statesman article. And it's delivered at the top of the piece, very confidently, as if it's fact. And I just can't seem to find it anywhere else. But I still stand by it. Okay. So I read a review of a book called Cleopatra Alive by Stacey Schiff. Yes.

But the review was by Mary Beard, who I think we do trust as a classicist. And she wrote about a famous procession in honor of the god Dionysus in the third century BC by Ptolemy the second. So that's before Cleopatra. And they wrote that there were floats. And one of the floats had a large statue which stood up mechanically without anyone laying a hand on it and sat back down again when it had poured a libation of milk. Oh, wow. So I don't know if this is the same thing or even if that's true. but I, you know, that is from a good source.

Yep. But it seems to me like maybe two things have been conflated. I don't know, though. Was it a statue of Cleopatra? Because that would be truly extraordinary. Before she was born. Before she was born. Well, it might not have been before the first Cleopatra,

because Cleopatra was actually Cleopatra the seventh. Yes. The one who is famous, you know, for having affairs with Julius Caesar and Mark Kennedy and things like this. She was the seventh. You know how she hooked up with Caesar? Tender. Yeah. It was like their version of Tinder

And this is how it worked She was married at the time to her brother As was customary So she actually married both of her brothers Both called Ptolemy And she engineered the death of both of them as well I smell a sick calm No so she decided that she wanted

To hang out with Caesar Because she was a very powerful man I wanted to have a bit of flirting with him And she was having a feud with her husband And Seater was Ptolemy's enemies Sorry which Ptolemy are we talking about We're talking about Tolome her brother or Ptolemy her other brother.

She really had a type, did she? Filling in the profile of the dating agency. Must be six foot, called Ptolemy, my brother. Yeah, it was Ptolemy her brother. Which one? Her other brother. Her other brother. Right.

Anyway, he said you obviously can't see Caesar because he's my enemy. And so she had herself wrapped up in a carpet and smuggled into Caesar's personal quarters. I think this is a famous depiction of her. She's always unrolled in films of Clearpacres, isn't she? I love that. It's so fun, the idea of being unrolled from a carpet onto the floor. You know what?

It sounds like fun, but I reckon when you do it, it's not going to be much fun. Because the carpet will be round by the end of the rolling process, but as it gets closer and closer towards your body as you're being unrolled, obviously the carpet will be more in your shape and you'll be sort of bumping over the floor. You're going to be bumping. It's going to be. Yeah. That's if you haven't suffocated in the carpet.

Maybe there's a delay. That would have been a sudden. Anticlimatics, which is a dead clear patch who was all down in front of season. Roll her back up. Were they ferociously inbred then, if they were all marrying their siblings? Yes. But she wasn't having babies with them.

It was all about keeping power. That would be disgusting. Right. Yeah. It was all about keeping power. So she married one of the Ptolemies when he was 10, and that was so that he could be the co-ruler. Oh, okay.

But the thing is, I don't think they were particularly against having sex with each other. Oh, I loved it. Loved it. Cleopatra had only six great-great-great-grandparents out of a possible 16. Wow. Wow. Wow. But on the plus side, she had a lot of extra toes.

Is that a plus? Toes aren't that useful. I feel like I've just got enough. It would make the game of this little piggy goes to market go on a long time. Yeah, that's true. Just on... This little piggy married his brother. It was also called Ptolemy.

Tolemy. Just speaking of toes, I found out a thing a while ago, ancient Egypt, this is sort of going into robots. Ancient Egypt, they actually worked out how to make a strap-on toe for people who'd lost a toe so that it worked so that they could continue to walk like an Egyptian. That's a terrible joke. No, so it's amazing. They found it's the oldest use of augmenting a human prosthetic where they were able to

walking in and they found that it's because it's a leather and wooden thing that they were strap onto the toe uh the flexibility of it was up to 86% which meant that it literally worked like how a normal toe would function it wasn't that was like um they must have had prototype models and refined it refined it so the flexibility allowed them perfect gate for what they had before really is a specific rule in american football that you're not allowed to kick the ball with an artificial toe really why because it's spring loaded or something? Well, basically they pretty much all the rules in American football

are because people have done something and then they have to make a rule against it. But one of the best kickers of all time, I think he just got his record beaten for the longest ever kick, didn't have any toes on one of his feet. And he had a special, like, fake toe made so that he could kick properly.

And it shouldn't really have helped him in any way. If you look at it, it shouldn't have helped. But obviously his opponents didn't like the idea and so they banned it. That's really petty. Yeah, that's a shame. As if that, yeah. Can I just say this prosthetic toad dates back between the time of 950 and 710 BC.

It's really old. Yeah, really advanced technology. I have another thing from around 950 BC. Oh, yeah. Okay, so this is an automaton by King Mu of Zhu in China. I've probably pronounced that wrong, but that's how it looks. He had an engineer called Yan Shi. And Yan Shi gave him a human-shaped figure which walked with rapid strides, moved its head up and down, and touched its chin, and began singing in tune.

Okay, this was supposedly 950 BC. Wow. And the king obviously thought it was amazing. But then as the performance was drawing to an end, the robot winked its eye and made advances to the ladies of the audience. Oh, no. And so the king demanded that it be broken down. until it was proved that it was actually an automaton because he thought it was some kind of a live thing.

Also, it was an automaton. I assumed the climax was going to be that that was obviously just a sleazy man. Just painted himself silver. Well, I mean, it's a story from ancient China, so maybe it's not even true. In the BC era. They did have amazing things in the 18th century.

So these are automata, which are... So they're recorded, we have drawings of them and things like that. So there was one called the Vulcanson duck, built by a Frenchman called Jacques de Vaucanson in 1738. It could stretch his wings, it could smooth its feathers, it could splash around in water, it could stretch out and take corn from your hand, and then it produced realistic, horrible-smelling duck droppings.

Wow. And this was an automaton. It was unbelievable. And sometimes when he was making it perform in front of ladies, de Vauconon would put it in a little skirt. I'm not sure why. Yeah. What was the purpose that it served?

Was it useful? No, entertainment. It just provided you with duck droppings. Yeah, but that's all ducks do, to be fair. Well. And more ducks. You can eat them. That's true.

I don't know. I think, like, if you have one of the greatest engineers in France coming to you with his new invention, and all it is is a bit of metal that produces duck droppings, you might be disappointed. They're actually not even real. duck droppings, there are artificial duck droppings. Was it for people, you know when people can't commit to a child, those weird people who buy one of those strange lifelike dolls instead? Was it for people who couldn't commit to having a real pet duck?

Yeah, yeah, that was it, yeah. That's very thoughtful. Invention. So just back to Cleopatra quickly, she was pretty wild. She seemed to have a lot of fun in her life, according to, well, the contemporary records. When she got into a carpet warehouse, she, she, Sometimes they wouldn't find it for weeks Imagine her at the Oscars as well

And Cleopatra's not appeared Weirdly the red carpet hasn't been delivered either Oh my God, what's happening here? That should have been like Was it Elizabeth Taylor who played Clairepatrick? She should have arrived like that, shouldn't she? That would have been amazing Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show

And that is James Okay, my fact this week came on Twitter through at flock of words, and it is that manatees control their buoyancy through flatulence. Very clever. Yeah, it's good. There's loads of good ways that animals control their buoyancy. Because if you think about it, if you're living in water,

you want to decide how high and low you're going to be, don't you really? Yeah, yeah. So cuttlefish, cuttlefish have a bone with holes in it. Okay, cuttle bone, it's known as. and the hollow structure contains both liquid and gas and the cuttlefish can change its density by varying the quantity of liquid within its bones. That is amazing.

Isn't that amazing? Yeah, that's incredible. Do we do anything like that as humans? No, we go up and downstairs. Yeah, but do we do anything on the way? I mean, I fart a bit. Well, think about it this way. If you're in a swimming pool and you hold your breath,

actually you wouldn't sink under the water. you'll be naturally buoyant. Yes. And then if you let all the air out, you naturally go down. Right. Okay. Antarctic krill do things a bit like humans. They don't have these bones like cuttle fish and they don't fart like manatees.

But what they do is they kind of tread water all the time. So they're always kind of moving their little swimming legs back and front to make sure that they stay at the right level. That sounds so annoying. I know. Imagine that your whole life you're just treading water. Oh, that's a horrible metaphor, isn't it? but they migrate, I think daily, they migrate, and they don't migrate across,

they migrate down and up. And they move to different bits of the water column, as it's called, depending on food and light and heat and this kind of thing. So that's how animals know where to hunt them. Are we sure they do that because of that and not just, they're trying to get to the surface and then they're so knackard, they give up and they drop back down to the bottom again?

I don't know. That sounds more plausible. I was reading that manatees, they have to, hold their breath to be underwater. So they constantly have to come up and re-oxygenate. And they can take a lot in in one big breath. It's something like 90% of the oxygen just gets re- They change 90% of the air in their lungs in a single breath. In a single breath. If humans then they change about a tenth in a single breath. Wow. Yeah. So what they do, though, is when they go to sleep, they go down and they effectively do a form of sleepwalking, but sleep sleeping. Sorry, sleep swimming.

sleep swimming where they they come to the surface and they take in breath but they're still asleep and then go back down wow yeah it's just like a bit of sleep yeah because I can't tell it's like a half awake they say it's as close yeah exactly

it's as close to yeah it's like if you know that you got up in the middle of the night to check the clock to see what time it was or it was 4 am and then went back to sleep but you can remember that it's having a conscious memory but sort of also being still asleep kind of thing

why don't you keep your clock just within view of your bed so that you don't have to get up every time you need to know because my clock is my iPhone so you've got to press the button to turn it on to have a look I see, yeah it's a bit more complicated. That must be so annoying because they can only last about 20 minutes underwater max without getting up for air. Yeah, but they constantly... Well, they nap all the time.

They don't have a long period of sleep. They're not like eight hours in the evening. They just nap in small little doses all the time. They're pretty lazy, aren't they, manatees? Yeah. I've seen them. They just kind of, I don't know. Have you seen them all close?

Yeah. Oh, they look so cool. They are quite cool. I saw them in a sea centre and also in the wild. And in a sea centre, they all have like scars on them. This was a few years ago from where boats have hit them. Yeah, apparently 90% I think are scarred from boats. Wow.

But they just kind of, they're like cows. That's because they're called sea cows sometimes, aren't they? And they just kind of go around the sea, just grazing and then sleeping for a bit. What do you want them to do? Build milk squirting robots. But they look. like they're really fat and like they've got loads of blubber to survive in cold waters. And they haven't.

It turns out they're all intestines because they're herbivores. So they have to eat loads and loads of plants. They eat about a tenth of their weight in plants every day. Yeah. And so they have to constantly be grazing and constantly be digesting, which is where they get all the methane for their flatulents from. But the lack of blubber means they can't survive in cold waters. So they have to migrate when it gets cold in winter.

And sometimes they swim into the, you know, the warm water outlets of power plants and things like this. Because you get hundreds of manatees in Florida Just converging In fact, did you see in 2015 They got, I think 19 manatees got stuck in a pipe In a Florida Because they obviously gone Did the first one go in

And then the next one tried to save him And then they just got to go in Can you imagine how annoying that was with the first one? Why wasn't he shouting back? Going back up guys back up. Did they get out? Okay. Yeah, they all got out.

They were fine. They were bit dazed. They had to go in and put them on stretches is amazing seeing them. Yeah, they cut the pipe open. Oh, okay, right. There's a manatee hotline that you can call in Florida.

To talk to have manatees in your area. Well, because obviously, there's a lot of interesting rules that happen in Florida with manatees. There's stuff about you not allowed to touch a manatee. There was a case where a dad almost went to jail because there was a photo of him touching a manate that's illegal.

No, I don't mean disgusting touch, like literally touching a manate. Yeah, I know. Okay, I don't think anyone was thinking. your face suggested that's what I was saying. No, it wasn't at all. Okay. But thank you for clarifying.

But so one thing that they often get is phone calls from people saying that we've got huge problems. The manatees are in huge danger by the shore. And often what that is is that manatees actually mate very close just off the coast of Florida. And they do it in mass groups. And it looks like there's a struggle going on because the water is going crazy. So Nadia Gordon, she's a marine mammal. biologist with the state agency in Florida and she says the call we usually get is there's a mum manatee and all the babies are trying to save it but then in actuality the large female can have up to

20 something males trying to breed the one female and that's what's going on so it looks like they're in serious trouble and that's a lot of the phone calls they get so that's what happens you get all the males who are trying to mate with the female and the females in the middle and all the males are trying to get at her but they don't have claws or horns or anything like that or arms or anything. So they're just kind of bumping each other. So it's kind of like if you're in a nightclub and there was a load of men trying to get towards a woman, but they had their arms by their sides and they're kind of bumping each other. It would be a bit like that. That's the weirdest simile because no one's ever been in that situation in a nightclub where all the men have their arms

tied to their sides and are bumping towards the one. But I think clubs would be more enjoyable for women if that were the case. He certainly would. But I think you can imagine that. I can imagine it. I can imagine it. I like that. I would go to that club. But what happens, obviously, is that the one who's best at barging people out of the way gets the girl. But then the other ones, what do they do?

Well, actually, they tend to just try and mate with each other. Do they? Right. Also, in a way, everyone wins. Well, in a way. Everyone else has come joint second, I think. So obviously, they were mistaken for a mermaid,

we think, in Columbus's journal, he said he'd seen a mermaid, what the locals were referred to as a mermaid and we think it's a manatee. And you can kind of see why they look, if you look into their eyes, there's something very human about their faces. Well, they don't have eyelashes. Exactly, just like humans. And their eye muscles close in a circular motion like an aperture on a camera. Right.

Whoa. So there are some differences, obviously, between the human and the manities. Or you've got really weird boyfriends in your hands. They have large pendulous breasts. They do, right? That's where the name manatee comes from. It's an old Carib word meaning breast. Ah, okay.

And Columbus, when he saw them, he did say that they rose well out of the sea, but they're not so beautiful as they're said to be. No. For their faces had some masculine traits. And they had scars where they've been hit by boats. They had no eyelashes. On the other hand, those breasts were very pendulous. They have been at sea for a long time.

That's true. I guess that, yeah. And they are terrible in bed. Okay, that's it. That's all of your facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shreiberland, James, at Egg-shaped, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M. And Shazinski. You can email podcast at QI.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at QI Podcast. Please keep sending us in facts. We might do another show like this one day. Also, you can go to our website, no such thing as a fish.com, or you'll find all of our previous episodes.

You'll also find a link for our tour. There are tickets available now. We are doing a UK tour. Please come along. It's going to be really fun. We'll see again next week with another episode. Goodbye.